


Pick of the Litter

by DoilySpider



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Beholding, Canonical Character Death, Elias is a himbo, Eye Trauma, Homophobia, M/M, Power Imbalance, Pre-Jonah Elias, Which made this fic hard to know how to tag, brief mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:35:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22211905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoilySpider/pseuds/DoilySpider
Summary: How Elias Bouchard fell to the beholding, under the auspices of seduction. He never had a chance.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonah Magnus, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 24
Kudos: 290





	Pick of the Litter

**Author's Note:**

> "Hey Jack you have a new fandom! Are you going to write about any of your favs?"
> 
> "Nah, nah, let's write about a guy who's been dead the ENTIRE time and barely has any canon characterization."
> 
> Anyway I accidentally caught feelings about Pre-Jonah Elias and I can't wait to have everything I have decided about him unwritten by S5 canon. But for now, have this!

Elias Bouchard was smart enough to know that everyone else thought he was stupid. They wouldn’t be the first to think so; his family had certainly agreed. They had looked down their noses on his useless degree, and clucked their tongues ever so disapprovingly at his “proclivities.” Elias was never quite sure if they meant the casual drug use or his burgeoning homosexuality that he found impossible to repress. It was probably both. But it wasn’t as though he was a burnout; he had finished that degree, and he had gotten himself a job with it, a modest job but a job nonetheless. And whatever embarrassment his family thought his sexuality might bring, they could be assured in the fact that while Elias was very good at getting first dates, he was wretched at managing second ones, and no one seemed likely to stick around for long. None of that mattered, of course, when the decision was finally made and passed down from on high that as far as the Bouchards were concerned, he was no longer part of the family. Hell, they’d probably written him out of the wills and everything. Not that he would know, he hadn’t heard from any of them in so many years he couldn’t possibly know who was alive or dead. Which suited him just fine.

There had been an adjustment period. Elias was a creature of comfort and used to certain accommodations and fineries he could no longer afford. Just figuring out how to feed himself had slimmed him considerably, and he’d allowed his brown hair to get a bit shaggy. It seemed like it was going a bit gray, even, although he thought it made him look a little bit distinguished, and it matched his steely eyes. Honestly, the pot was one of the few little indulgences he still allowed himself on his salary. So the rest of them could judge him all they wanted, if they wished, but he was done trying to bend himself to please anyone else. It never worked.

It was only natural that when he was called to James Wright’s office that afternoon, he assumed it was disciplinary. It wouldn’t even be the first such meeting. They’d had to discuss his his overly long smoke breaks before, or his tendency to flirt with some of the men who came to give statements. This time he presumed it was probably some obnoxious dress code violation. He had let himself get a bit sloppy lately. Today he had on a rather natty old sportcoat and whichever plain tee shirt had been atop the clean pile, with a couple holes in places that were not for once a stylistic choice. Not his level best. 

It had to be something like that, anyway, because nobody ever asked for Elias when they were happy with him.

“Close the door behind you?” James said as Elias entered, tracing Elias’ outline with his sharp green eyes.

Elias sighed deeply and did as he was asked. Lord, this was about his appearance, wasn’t it? “Sir,” he said, clipped, impatient, “I know what you’re going to say…”

“Do you?”

“...and I understand that the Institute has standards, but I have been going through…” It finally reached the surface of Elias’ admittedly sometimes foggy mind that James was shrugging off his suit jacket, and he wasn’t stopping there. Elias blinked a few times to clear his vision, just to be sure. “Sir?”

James stared Elias down very patiently, his shirt hanging partially open, and rose to come around his desk. “Elias, you have two paths laid out before you,” he said. “If you turn around now, and you walk out the door… you will not be punished for leaving. You may continue your work as though this never happened. You may even, if you are truly so offended at the proposition, tender your resignation and leave with severance.” He reached out, tentatively, and laid his fingertips on Elias’ collarbone. Even Elias was surprised when he did not back away. “If however,” James continued, “you choose to  _ lock _ that door, well…” He raised an eyebrow.

Everything in Elias told him that he ought to say no. This was highly inappropriate and, quite frankly, an ugly and unfair imposition on him. He could, by all rights, probably have James forced to step down for this. And with his job filing in the bookkeeping department, he’d gotten to be on at least a smile-and-nod basis with many of the Institute’s financial backers, who he was sure wouldn’t be happy to hear about this proposition. It would be a danger to him to accept, and a danger just the same to walk away, no matter what James said, and that wasn’t right at all.

But James Wright wasn’t a bad looking man by any stretch of the imagination, especially for his age. He looked like an antique, something out of time, with his slicked back black hair and three piece suits. His appearance tended to put Elias in mind of some gilded era silver screen heartthrob. Now, watching this straight-laced buttoned-up man coming literally unbuttoned before him made Elias’ heart race with an intoxicating cocktail of anxiety and enticement.

And, for whatever reason, he’d chosen Elias. Elias, out of anyone.

Elias knew he should leave.

He reached behind himself and locked the door.

This would not be the last time.

Everything in Elias’ life changed with disorienting immediacy. Well, perhaps not everything. His family still hated him, his flat still sucked, and he still didn’t have many friends. But for the first time he could remember in a very long time, he was happy. Consistently happy. 

It didn’t matter that Elias could hardly take care of himself, because now James was taking care of him. James bought him fancy dinners and gave him money for takeaway. James got him a membership to a rather exclusive gym, exclusive enough that Elias could work out without anyone bothering him. James bought him expensive clothes and made him appointments with some of London’s most talented barbers. It was like being home again, except without the grueling misery of listening to his parents tut-tut and ask him when he was going to bring a nice young lady home, or when he was going to get a proper degree. Much like milk, Elias figured, you couldn’t really unspoil what had already been spoiled. And he was spoiled to the core.

Technically, it was a secret. Technically. But with Elias preening and peacocking his way around the Institute, and James very clearly spending a lot of time with him, it was getting to be a rather open secret over the last few months. Of course Elias saw the way some people stared, even glared. So let them. Elias was used to being looked down on. At least now he was being looked down on for something that he truly got something out of.

It wasn’t just the perks, although he could hardly argue with the perks. It was James. It was always James. Handsome James with his strong hands and sharp jaw and piercing green eyes that almost shone in the right light. James who would bend him over his desk and fuck him raw but somehow be so tender about it all the same, fingers exploring every inch of him, studying him, memorizing him. It was at once salaciously impersonal and deeply intimate. Even tucked into the hollow under James’ desk like a dirty secret while he went down on him, Elias felt somehow adored. 

Sometimes, James liked to just watch. He would have Elias kneel before him and pleasure himself while James just circled around him like a hawk, taking him all in. He wouldn’t even touch himself, just admire the view of Elias completely undone in his own pleasure. It made Elias feel helpless and exposed and wanted and perfect all at once. Sometimes he swore he could still feel James’ gaze hanging off him long after he left, but it made Elias feel safe somehow. Like there was always someone looking after him. Always someone with him.

If his parents could see him now, Elias was sure they would be ashamed. To see him running around with an older man, his boss no less. But really, hadn’t he beaten the game? He didn’t need to sacrifice his desires, his very sense of self, to get ahead in the world. He could have everything he wanted.

If James had never taken him home, Elias wondered if he might never have come undone. If they had kept it in the office, a salacious affair, it might have stayed just another delicious taboo for Elias to savor. Another one of his many vices. He could have been happy enough with that, he thought, because he had so little, and that was already so much.

But James took him home, to that old house. Very old, a Victorian it seemed, not a manor house or anything, but far too large for a man living alone, or so Elias thought. Too empty for him, although being there together with James still made every echoing, hollow place seem so full. James led him through every room by hand, toured him, until finally he brought him to the bedroom. James laid him down so gently on that four post bed and undressed him inch by inch. His gaze always penetrated Elias as deep as anything else, locking eyes with him as he pushed in. And Elias didn’t blink or look away, he met him in kind, even as his breath got lost on the way out of his lungs. It was a marvel to him how much James loved to watch him. How safe and kept and wanted he felt. Wanted. That was it. The feeling of being wanted, of being needed, of being somehow important to someone else. The feeling of being known inside and out. He wanted James to read him like a book. He wanted James to have him completely. Elias could get used to this, being a kept man, a pretty thing on James Wright’s arm for the rest of his life. Or anything James wanted him to be.

So when they were both spent, James completely unspooled in pleasure beside him, Elias himself shaken and breathless and alive, Elias was powerless but to choke out, “I love you.”

James didn’t say anything, but from the slow smile that dawned on his face, Elias was sure he felt the same.

Elias didn’t renew the lease on his awful flat. He moved in with James not long after that. James didn’t like it when he smoked in the house, which was their one point of consternation to date, but every relationship has compromises.

At some point Elias asked if it wouldn’t be better if he quit the Institute, to rectify the impropriety of their relationship. James assured him that he didn’t think Elias could. He was right too, honestly, because Elias couldn’t imagine not being able to sneak away from his desk for a quick kiss or a fuck midday. 

That Lukas man had been through bookkeeping recently to drop off a check before having one of his little meetings with James. He’d fixed Elias with such a look for a long, long moment before leaving. Jealous, probably, Elias assumed. It seemed like he and James had had some history, and he probably wasn’t pleased with the younger, better model he’d been replaced with. This gave Elias a certain cynical glee. 

The old lady from the Archives had also given him a look of late. Not sour though. It almost seemed like pity. Like she knew something he didn’t. Like she felt sorry for him. Well, Elias was about done with people who thought they knew better than him about how he ought to live his life. He’d shed one mother and didn’t need another henpecking him. Besides, who cares about the judgement of a woman with that kind of turnover rate in her subordinates?

Elias slunk up to James’ office late in the day, while everyone else was closing up. He was hoping for a quickie on James’ desk before they went home, but when James saw him, how his beautiful eyes lit up, and Elias was struck still in quiet admiration of him for a moment. “Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” James said. “I actually wanted to show you something.”

“Anytime. Always,” Elias said.

James walked up to him, and he held out a hand. “Come. It’s a secret, but I believe I can trust you.”

Elias shivered when he took that hand. He felt all his fondness welling up in his chest when beheld by James like this. Something about him, despite being a bit shorter than Elias, made Elias feel towered over. Sheltered and shielded and guarded. “Of course you can trust me.” He would go anywhere with him.

He let James lead him through the now vacant halls of the Institute, down to the basement level, down through the Archives, and down a trap door. Elias stared in bewilderment and wonder at the sprawl of tunnels that unfurled before them. “Wow,” he breathed, “has this been down here the whole time?” A stupid question that he regretted the instant it crossed his lips.

But his James would never chide him for it. “Of course,” he said simply, with that prim demeanor of his. “But this isn’t the real surprise. It’s further down, come along.”

And even in the cold of this subterranean maze, when Elias held onto James he felt warm.

In time and winding routes and echoes they came to a cavernous room with something of a tower standing at its center. Elias blinked at it, stunned. “Who built all this?” he scoffed. “Why?” It just seemed so elaborate for something so buried and long forgotten.

“You’ll understand later,” James assured him. He coaxed him, ever so gently, to the tower. “Come along, come along, it’s up here.” He squeezed Elias’ hand a little. “This is very important to me, you see. Very personal. I’d trust almost no one with this. No one but you, my treasure.”

Elias wasn’t sure if the sound that came from him was a fraction of a laugh or a fraction of a sob, but it stumbled off his tongue and fell flat just the same. He held onto James so tight up the winding stairs, the cold and the dim of the room sliding off him. He wondered of course what it could possibly be. But it was a marvel, a little miracle, that James trusted him so with that which he kept so hidden.

Finally they came to the top of the stairs. And he saw it there. It was hard to understand at first, a bundle of jagged rotting leather and hair, it seemed, wrapped in rags. Were those bones in there? Elias squinted, staring harder, struggling to reason it out in the stubborn haze of his mind.

He felt James’ breath against his ear, and heard his whisper so close. “That’s me.”

Elias was transfixed on the desiccated corpse. The wonderment of trust was being flooded out by rising nausea and confusion. “James? What…”

But James spun him around, and put Elias down on his knees, hand tangled in his hair to hold his head up. A move James had pulled on him before to Elias’ delight, but this time it was a knife that James stuck in his face. “And now you’re going to be me too.”

Elias stared up at James, uncomprehending. The cold must finally be getting to him, because he was shivering so. He still didn’t get the joke. This was, assuredly, a joke. Though James had never been the joking type. But there was some old mummy down here, and his James had pulled a knife on him, so far down down down that Elias’ cries could echo all they liked but they would never reverberate far enough for someone to hear. “I don’t understand,” he whispered, voice thick with desperation.

“Why don’t I help you out a bit,” James offered. He loosened his grip on Elias’ hair to slide his hand affectionately down Elias’ face and caressed his cheek. Elias desperately, instinctively nuzzled into his palm, needing the comfort. “I might as well move a few of my things in early.” He laid his fingertips upon Elias’ temple.

A terrible weight and a jagged knowing clattered into Elias’ mind. He saw hundreds of years of stolen life. He saw a James, not his James, but a dear and brown-eyed James that maybe could have been someone Elias could have loved if someone else hadn’t stolen him away. A James who was wined and dined and romanced much as Elias had been before becoming… this. And Elias saw his James. And he saw those cutting green eyes. And he saw Jonah Magnus. And he saw Jonah Magnus. And he saw Jonah Magnus. The shrill howl of horror that rattled from Elias’ body coiled through the panopticon like swells of music and this James, this false James seemed to relish it.

James grabbed him by the hair again, pulled him into place, and pressed the tip of the blade up to the socket of Elias’ eye, nudging the eyelid down.

Elias whined, reached up to grip James’ wrist with two quivering hands. “Please, don’t. Please please don’t. James. I love you. Please, I love you, don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything. You know I’ll do anything to please you, so don’t…”

“Actually, it’s me who’s going to be doing something for you,” James said.

Elias’ whole body locked up as the first spike of pain came.

“I am going to do for you what you never could.”

Elias shrieked as the pain blossomed, as everything started to blur.

“I am going to make something of you.”

And the cutting began in earnest, the prying. Elias’ screams crescendoed until all he could manage to voice was whimpers. He wished what he could feel running down his face was tears. 

It wasn’t the loss of his sight that cut the deepest. It wasn’t the mutilation and pain, for the shock took care of the worst of the pain right quick. It was the feeling of that warm, looked after feeling flowing away from him, leaving him alone, so alone. It was the feeling that rushed in to replace it, the aching knowledge that in all this time, he had never once known what it felt like to be loved. Not once. Not once.

That was the last thought he had before Jonah Magnus started to slide in. Before Jonah Magnus filled him up completely. Before there was no more room for himself. Before there was no mor

***

Outside the Magnus Institute, closed up now save for a few night staff and busy body researchers pulling long hours, Peter Lukas stood tamping down tobacco into his pipe. He fumbled around, feeling his pockets for a match, until a slim hand reached out and handed him one. He glanced over, eyeing the giver up and down, then took it and struck it up against the doorframe. “So, how does it fit?”

Jonah, once James, now Elias, reached out his arms, flexed and bent them, rolled the wrists, like trying to break in the sleeves on a tight new suit. “I’ll get used to it,” he said, “I always do.”

Peter chuckled knowingly at that and lit up his pipe. “He could have been one of mine you know,” he remarked, and sighed out some smoke. “If I’d gotten to him first.”

Elias, now Elias, and Elias ongoing, regarded Peter with his cold, dead green eyes. “Yes, well, I might have played you for him if I weren’t on a bit of a deadline. Old James’ heart wasn’t going to hold out much longer.”

“Suppose I can still have a go at what’s left of him, hm?” Peter said, and raised an eyebrow.

“Over my dead body, Peter.”

“If that’s how you’d prefer it.”

Elias scoffed. He wrinkled his nose, then thumbed at the lapels of the suit he was wearing and scowled. “Oh, I do hope the smell will come out eventually,” he sighed. “I have a business to run. Well, of course I left myself everything in the will. I can always replace it all if need be.”

Tapping at his pipe, Peter leaned up against the stone walls of the Institute and gazed out over the horizon. “Why him, anyway?” he said. “He wasn’t the most believable choice. You could have picked anyone.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Elias remarked. He stared down at the wrists he’d pinned over this head so many times before. “He had to want to be watched. He had to to want to be seen. And I saw him.”

And he smiled to himself, slowly.

***

Somewhere, nowhere, Elias curls in on himself, and he wants to weep but he has no eyes with which to weep, no lungs with which to sob, no mouth with which to cry out. He is huddled within, deep within, and there is this burning staring that embraces him always. He is always seen. He is always known. Not with love, not with regard, picked apart like a sample on a slide. Scrutinized. Like he always has been. And always will be.


End file.
